“Mom? Dad?”
Nicholas appeared, looking bleary and pissed off.
“Wonderful,” Wiley said.
Brooke said to their son, “Dad has a sour stomach.”
“You’re fighting.”
“I love your mom too much to fight with her. I just obey.” He made a steeple of his hands and bowed toward her.
“Except you don’t, Daddy.” Now Kelsey had arrived, his gorgeous little girl. “He has cigars hidden in the woods.”
“That is not true!”
Brooke folded her arms. So did Kelsey. Brooke glared. “The aliens you go looking for in the woods, Wiley Dale? Would they be from Cuba?”
“The cigars are Matt’s,” he said.
“And he’s out there right now, isn’t he, smoking a Monte and sucking on a bottle of Beam, and that’s the real reason you want to take a walk—to make yourself sick on cigars and hootch.”
“Cubans are the best cigars in the world.”
“You’re coming to bed with me. And scoot, you two, the sandman’s gonna be furious.”
“I’m past the sandman,” Nick said.
“I’m not,” Kelsey told him. “I’m just a little girl, and I still believe.”
“Meaning, don’t rain on your sister’s parade.”
“No, Sir.”
Wiley went into the bedroom and fished his flashlight out from under the bed where he kept it alongside his shotgun. “I need some space, hon. This thing I’m writing, it’s getting to me, for sure, and I agree with you, we need that not to happen. It’s about us and about people who live in another version of this house in a parallel universe. I think that’s what it’s about, anyway. I’m sort of more of a reader than a writer, here. Reading as my fingers write, as it were.”
“About us in what sense?”
“Well, like this conversation. This will be in the book. Because we’re part of the story, somehow. I’m not sure how, yet, but we’re part of it.”
“Not our names again!”
Uh-oh. He had to tread carefully here. “Well, uh…hm. The people in the parallel universe aren’t us. They have different names. They live in their version of this house and the town is called Harrow, too, but the people are not the same.”
“I am so tired of this.”
“Whoa, slow down. The parallel universe is obviously different. Their McDonald’s has emerald arches. Their Target target is blue. The president’s named James Hannah Wade and the family’s named Winters. We’re the Dales, if you hadn’t noticed. And here, McDonald’s has golden arches, obviously. Plus there is no British Empire, among numerous other things. They have two small moons rather than one large one.”
“In the part of it that’s set in our universe, what are the characters’ names?”
She knew him well and she was not dumb. Far from dumb. “Well, of course, I’m using ours—”
“NO!”
“Well, uh, it’s us. They’re us.”
“My kids’ names will not be in another one of your books. You know what Nicholas said? He said you really are the most embarrassing father in the world, and he was right! Saying you were taken aboard a UFO was bad enough, but you included him! When he was all of seven years old. Wiley, where do you get off?”
“The names are—are—like, they’re just place markers. After I’m done, I’ll change them.”
“Because it’s an act of vanity to write novels about yourself!”
“Brooke, goddamnit, that’s a betrayal. You know it happened.”
“It hurt this family so much, honey. I just can’t go through it again. The kids can’t. Especially not your son. He is so brave but he suffers.”
“What do you mean?”
“The kids eat him alive! His dad got a rectal probe. You try living that down at the age of twelve.”
“The laughter is the failure, not the book. It happened.” He paused. “It just wasn’t what I thought.” There came to him, then, a feeling—a sort of pull, really. To go back to the office, to sit down…
But not after sixteen straight hours, he’d be in heart attack country. Stroke country.
“Thing is, this book—I’m not its author, babes, I’m its prisoner.”
“You will be responsible, Wylie Dale. You will be!”
“All right, that’s it! I’m going walking. You’ll be asleep when I get back, God willing.”
“If I smell the least trace of cigar smoke—”
“Kelsey’s gotta have Indian blood, the way she follows me and I never see her. But neither one of us is an Indian, my dear, so how do you explain that?”
“By the fact that you’re two hundred percent hot air and half baked.” She came to him. “Which are two of the many reasons that I’m so damn crazy about you.”
She kissed him. He was furious at her, but he kissed her back, and she felt so vulnerable and so—so Brooke. He held her tight.
Noisy though it was, this marriage was a good fit for Wiley Dale. He needed someone willing to come up the side of his head on occasion, and Brooke had no compunction about that. But he was not going to change any names in any part of the book, this one included. “You’re so nice,” he said.
Little feet went scurrying away. Kelsey could be heard whispering, “We have a kiss. Gawd!”
Wylie and Brooke managed to swallow their laughter.
When he went downstairs, she sort of tried to stop him, but he promised to come back soon. He really did need that air. If he didn’t get away from that keyboard and let this thing die down, he’d be up all night.
He left the house, glad to enter his familiar woods beneath the familiar starry sky—and that good old moon up there, good old friend. It couldn’t be very romantic to have two moons.
He sucked the air deep to rid his head of the fog that the writing had invoked. He shuddered. It was a mild night, but he felt cold in his blood.
He had lived Martin’s sense of suffocation down under the pyramid, had cringed in anguish of terror with him as the blocks smashed down around him, had actually not known whether or not he was going to be annihilated.
Creepy enough, but even creepier was the fact that he could still feel Martin’s presence. See him, sort of. He was down in Harrow, and things had gone very bad since his visit to the White House just—what was it—eleven or twelve days ago?
He was down in Harrow and he was living in absolutely amazing terror, and Wylie knew that, as soon as he returned to his office, he was going to live that terror, too.
Thing was, he could sort of see into the lenses, and what he saw there was another parallel earth, a third one, and it was bad news. Real bad.
He couldn’t see it clearly, but he could feel that it was a fallen world, a real, living hell, and it was seeking to escape itself. He could sense its ravening hunger to escape the ruin it had made of itself.
Amazingly enough, they’d done even worse than we had. “They’re old,” he muttered to himself, returning to one of the lines of thought that he’d been worrying for years. He thought he might now know the secret of the bizarre creatures he had encountered in these woods a few years back, that were the subject of Alien Days. They weren’t aliens at all. They were from here. But in their version of earth, the dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Instead, that dark reptilian brain had grown and evolved and changed until these sleek creatures had come about— tough, brilliant, and utterly heartless.
Oh, God. God help the human beings.
With our compassion and our softness of spirit, we were not going to be a match for brilliant reptiles, not in Martin’s universe or in this one.
They were going to take it all. They really, really were.
The woods were dead quiet, the early December night touched by just an edge of crispness. As always, he
